I remember a time when tech review sites would review heatsinks without recording room ambient. I remember a time when fan reviews didn't use decibel meters and the phrase "They're very quiet, all I heard was a gentle whooshing of air" constituted glowing approval for a fan's noise level. I remember a time when GPU reviews didn't include noise measurements either, beyond a subjective judgement. Hell, I remember when nobody cared how loud their rig was except the lunatics over at SPCR!
But the fact is, Antec released the original P180 in 2006. Every major case manufacturer makes silence focused models and refers to this in their marketing. be quiet!
named their company after the single performance metric they insisted was most important.
At the same time (2006), companies like Antec and Silverstone with the Antec 900 and the RV01 redefined expectations of case performance in an entirely opposite market segment, by focusing on cooling at all costs - a common complaint at the time being that regular cases like the Xaser V, which was highly reviewed in 2004, simply didn't offer the cooling capability super hot hardware like the Pentium 4 and the 8800GTX demanded in order to run safely at a time when thermal protection was not a given in PC hardware.
We're 13 years on. Case manufacturers have been touting the coolness and quietness of their cases for over a decade, and yet reviewers seem reluctant to put these claims under even the most basic possible scrutiny.
It is not asking too much to suggest that times have changed for cases just like they changed for CPUs and GPUs.
For CPUs since 2004 we've seen a change whereby outright speed is no longer the only measure of a CPU - we now care about about power consumption, IPC, thermals, overclockability, etc. Not only that but we go into detail in architectural analyses on regular, consumer-facing websites like TPU and Anandtech, about how and why new CPU designs achieve what they achieve.
For GPUs we've seen a similar shift - We no longer focus so hard on features and raw framerate, but on power consumption, thermals, noise, the degree to which a GPU favours a certain graphics API or Engine, driver stability, and we've taken VRM analysis to the point where if a review doesn't have it, that review is garbage written by someone who knows nothing about GPUs.
For cases, it seems as though consumers and manufacturers alike have moved from a focus on solely ease of installation, to also thermals, noise, aesthetics, cable management, and even ease of maintenance and dust filtration - but for some reason the reviews Darksaber and most other sites put out are essentially identical to the reviews
Tweaktown was putting out in 2004 for the aforementioned Xaser V.
It isn't too much to ask that TPU of all places, get it together and make their case reviews do as good a job of informing consumers as their GPU and CPU reviews do.
As further comment by the way, this is what 2009 era fan reviews were like compared to the
several screens long page full of charts, graphs and testing that VSG provides.
No deltas, no record of room ambient, no noise measurements, no understanding of static pressure compared to cfm, etc. This was the norm for fan reviews in the mid to late 00's. We've come a long way for fans. Why not for cases?
